I spent last week with a friend who is one of India's few futurists. The conversation, given my obsessions, mainly focused on politics. I discussed the Narendra Modi regime and pointed to its durability. I noted that Modi has won three rounds of national elections. He has been the prime minister in most people's memory in this young country.
My friend laughed sceptically. He said, “You're wrong on two counts. One, you're too obsessed with Modi.” What we hadn't discussed was the system. “And two”, he said, “as a futurist, I must tell you that your tense is wrong. You're talking about the present. But to even understand the present, you need a sense of the future,” he added academically.
This is why writers like Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung and Austrian peace campaigner Robert Jungk advise that futurology be taught to the younger generations. They would have a better sense of the alternatives and their imagination would extend to a different sense of power.
My friend then asked to consider an exercise. “One of the things that bothers me is that democracy is too often seen purely as an electoral ritual. One has to see it at a normative level. One has to see the concepts, the language and the institutions that sustain a democracy.” In this context, he pointed out that citizenship has become a nebulous concept. It has a kind of temporariness that it never had before. Sometimes it's even difficult to differentiate between a refugee and a resident.
He gave a second example: “Take federalism. It’s not just a competition for power. It’s a system that seeks a balance.” He pointed out that federalism has been undermined by the electoral system. The majoritarian regime tends to seek a ‘double-engine’ system. What it means is it wants power both at the state and national levels. Such a double-engine system, my friend pointed out, undermines the future of federalism.
One can look at the Election Commission in a similar way. It was one of the most sacrosanct and professional among the State institutions. Today, in its attempt to re-evaluate citizenship, the commission has lost its sense of sanctity, sense of objectivity and sense of being a balancing act.
My friend added that language is another thing democracy has to pay attention to, because the decay of language becomes a sign of the decay of democracy. He proposed to consider categories like the minority and the marginalised.
At one time, they were considered to be adding to the plurality of our democracy. Today, we tend to reify these concepts. But we tend to make them open to a different kind of vulnerability. Muslims, in a deep sense, feel vulnerable in India today, and it's this sense of vulnerability that one has to challenge if one wants to keep a future stake in democracy.
In this context, he pointed out that one of the dangers has been the whole idea of ‘civil society’. The regime seems to think that political cadres constitute civil society. But a society full of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadres is not a democracy. It would be an ideological dead end.
He then pointed out that sometimes democracy is about life’s expectations. And in this context, he said that one of the greatest disasters threatening us today is the ill fate of our tribal communities. Whether one looks at the question of Assam or the Andamans, deeply and fundamentally, this regime seems to have no interest in the future of tribal communities. Nominating a member of a tribal community as president adds to the hypocrisy of this current world.
What's worse is that the very idea of ecology seems to be non-existent with this regime. That is the question of the Andamans and the question of Himachal Pradesh. Both emphasise that this regime has no ecological imagination, nor does it have a concern for the Anthropocene.
So whether it's the local or the global, this regime seems to lack a sense of what nature could do as imagination—as livelihood, as a way of life.
My friend said, “If you want to look closely, the entire discourse of governance is anchored around three terms—security, development and patriotism.” Patriotism has become a difficult word that’s so narrow that it's defined only in a majoritarian sense. This very disappearance of the constructiveness of a patriot is one of the hallmarks of the failure of democracy.
In this regime as in others past, development can turn genocidal. But if an ecological project were to challenge the idea of development, it's immediately condemned for its lack of patriotism. Security, too, has become a cast-in-iron word; in a strange way, it hardly combines with sustainability. Because of this absence of dialectics, the regime may lack tension in a few ways. But isn’t this the tension that makes democracy possible?
My friend came around to the point that democracy is a futuristic exercise. It anticipates a better world. And it's precisely this sense that is missing in this regime. I asked him, “What do you think are the possible answers?” He said that we need a different kind of pedagogy. We need a different kind of history. And we need an answer to the kinds of violence we see today. Violence has become a form of consumption. People tend to inflict crimes on women and replay their recordings, pretending they have exonerated the history.
He said, “Deeply and fundamentally, one needs to rework the idea of democracy as a pedagogy, as a theoretical exercise, as a practice—towards an operation of everydayness. This democracy, by becoming a rigid game of rules, has lost essential tensility.
My friend said, “Maybe I sound naive.” I realised that academics often sound both naive and lethal, which is what makes the university such a fascinating academy for dissent. My friend laughed and agreed. We concluded that the university is the biggest casualty of the current regime.
We stopped at this moment. But the thought that a futuristic exercise would be a crucial part of a revived democratic imagination lingered.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)